The conflation of the works by
Magdalena Więcek and Natalia Załuska in the context of the exhibition PAS DE DEUX is due to
the cultural resonance chamber and frame of reference of their common country
of origin, Poland, as well as to the fascination of the young artist Załuska for the aesthetic innovations of the 1950s and
1960s: Magdalena Więcek, who died in 2008, counted amongst the most
significant sculptors of her country, yet had an impact far beyond its borders.
Karl Prantl already invited her in 1963 to his legendary symposia. Her
sculpture which was created at that time can still be seen in the quarry of St.
Margarethen in Burgenland, Austria.

The large-format markings of Magdalena Więcek, executed with spray paint on paper, which can
be viewed in the exhibition reflect the fascination of the artist, who was born
in 1924 in Katowice, for the spectacle of forms and colours of the industrial
epoch. The images are geometric structures, sometimes slightly displaced and
shifted, and with a light veil of brownish or steel grey hue; they are
reminiscent of rusted metal or of machinery elements which have been exposed to
wind and weather.

Other works depict red lines
which interact with curved, rounded complexes of forms on a black background.
They call to mind the micro-world of biological organisms as well as the
infinite vastness of the cosmos, in which the planets begin to dance. Yet they
are also equally suggestive of the blue lines of conceptual artist Edward Krasiński – another artist who is an inspiration for Natalia Załuska.

Magdalena Więcek at the beginning of her career still had to
fight against the dictates of the Socialist Realism of the Stalinist era. She
had to emancipate herself from this in order ultimately to discover her own
visual language informed by Minimalism, the legendary exhibition Primary Structures (1966, New York) and
Abstraction.

Natalia Załuska took up such precepts, yet
nevertheless varied them in accordance with her own aesthetic notions which are
located in the post-heroic space of an art that creatively administers and
shapes the heritage of the revolutions. On her canvases one frequently
encounters irregularities, sections, scarifications and scratches that disturb
the symmetry of a perfectly executed geometry and break the illusion of an art
of the intact beauty of form. An intuition for the vulnerability of things and
people becomes apparent, which further develops those narratives that were
formed by Magdalena Więcek under completely different socio-political
conditions as epigrammatic, aesthetic positings. Both artists are united in
their striving for a balance between nonchalance and control, a balance which
is constantly newly negotiated; a balance between aesthetic symmetry and
violent or paradoxical interventions. What Adam Budak wrote about Natalia Załuska is also, with the benefit of hindsight, applicable to Magdalena Więcek: "The artist activates the surfaces and creates a sensual polylog
between the layers of her works." A polylog which not only occurs within
the works, but which, over time and space, allows the heroic avant garde to
collide excitingly with the anything goes
attitude of the present.